J!Day España (Spain) 2012 took place recently in the ancient Roman city of Mérida, and our own Saurabh Shah, a CloudAccess.net front end developer, lead a presentation & workshop at the event. Saurabh’s session was titled “Create & Modify Joomla! Templates” and his goal was to teach people how to create their own Joomla! templates through one of the following ways:

CloudAccess.net recently gave new meaning to the phrase cloud computing as we literally took to the sky with 4 CloudAccess.net servers. We moved the servers from our Traverse City data center to a new & improved facility that offers increased Internet connectivity in addition to an ultra-secure physical structure.

Two CloudAccess.net server administrators, Chris Ecklesdafer and Motaz, made the flight from Traverse City to the Metro Detroit area. We chartered a private plane to fly the servers to the new facility instead of driving them there because it decreased the overall downtime that our clients experienced. Below is a timeline of events:

Warning to all readers: this is not a blog post. It is a shameless brag post!

Now that you have had fair warning, and you've chosen to continue reading, we would like to unveil the latest CloudAccess.net news tid-bit. Earlier today, during some routine Google PageRank checking, we found that the CloudAccess.net PageRank has risen to the astronomical value of 8!

The History of PageRank

Developed way back in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page (that’s where the “Page” comes in), the system was set to use algorithms that ranked sites on a 1-10 scale based on link popularity. Soon after this system was designed, it was put into use when the same two gentlemen founded a company you may have heard of, Google. Essentially, PageRank is one of many indicators to a sites link popularity.

When GoDaddy's down, who ya gonna call? CloudAccess!

Godaddy’s DNS network went down today, and it's not a surprise. This was caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack causing extended downtime for millions of websites world-wide. At CloudAccess.net, we've built a very special DNS network aptly named “Bolt-DNS”. Bolt-DNS is a distributed DNS network that allows us to handle very large volumes of traffic even during a DDOS attacks. Our Bolt-DNS network will distribute the traffic evenly during these attacks, and it quickly reacts by working with our DNS data centers to stop or block any denial of service attacks.

The Godaddy DNS outage has also affected the sending and receiving of email messages for thousands of people. CloudAccess.net partners with Google for email services for a more reliable email hosting service. In the case where Godaddy email is down, our system stays up. In fact, taking down both Google and CloudAccess.net would be nearly impossible. You cannot take down two of the biggest players in DNS world down at the same exact time. Both providers have cached networks that would continue to route mail even on the largest of network attacks. Since your Godaddy email is directly connected to a non-distributed DNS network rather than on a massive network like Google and CloudAccess.net, you're subject to failures.

We don’t like being too presumptuous here at CloudAccess.net. Our company is comprised of many smart, hard working folks and we know a thing or two about the hosting and storage industry, but we don’t like to boast about it. As we constructed the Joomla! VPMC, as we do with all our products, we chose the best technology so we could, in turn, offer the best product available. That’s why we went with Texas Memory System and their RamSan® SSD solution - a flash-based Storage Area Network (SAN), which is coveted as being “The World's Fastest Storage®”.

Great minds must think alike, because IBM also thought that TMS had created something quite unique. IT was announced today that they have “entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire TMS”. Good idea, IBM. We like the way you think, but, we bought into TMS first (na na na boo boo).

The Joomla Content Management System is coming to the heart of America, CHICAGO! Come to the windy city and hang out with a whole bunch of Joomla users and experts. Learn the business of Joomla and more about what the world’s most amazing CMS has to offer.

We don't only work with Joomla, we also use it. A lot of us help clients on a daily basis, but we also create our own personal sites.

My father is a (retired) military man, and I am very proud of him and his service. The unit that he was stationed with the longest - the 7th Radio-Technical Battalion of Łask, Poland, where he served as Chief of Arms, had a fairly poor website and I decided to build them a new one using Joomla.

The old site had a lot of features when I took over, but it was still in the raw HTML form, and, speaking frankly, it would have made a 1990's web developer cry blood. I decided to remake it in Joomla! The military unit (Siódmy Łaski Batalion Radiotechniczny in Polish) no longer exists, as the splash page states. The site was initially just a single page where the unit's “sympathizers” could learn about future reunions. Later, as old service men and other staff found each other, they started exchanging photos, and a gallery was born. The history of the battalion was developed in much the same way. Subsequent reunions produced even more photographs and the gallery currently features 13 years of reunion photographs from 1998 to 2011. Older photographs of equipment the men when they were soldiers were also added. Images of Polish-made and USSR-made weapons, radio turrets, guidance systems and much more were also added.

Props to Pawel Borowicz, our lead graphic artist, for designing this incredible infographic now featured at joomla.org. The infographic displays a variety of information about the six year history of Joomla (2006-2012). Included in the infographic are statistics about the rise in monthly traffic at Joomla.org, the growing JED, the expanding Joomla multilingual capabilities, JCM submissions, Joomla Forum visitors and posts, and worldwide Joomla! Day events.

Joomla! contacted Pawel about creating the infographic around the most central statistic: the 30 millionth download. The numbers speak for themselves, but the infographic combines the stats to capture just how popular Joomla! has become. Pawel worked closely with the Joomla! Marketing Team to develop this and when I spoke with him about it he said “they [the marketing team] sent me the statistics and I made them pretty.”

Hi folks! Congratulations to the Joomla! Day Malaysia organizers on a big success. I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to the tallest Joomla! Day event ever, held on the 29th floor in the Microsoft office in the world's tallest twin towers, Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I would also like to thank Meriza, Azrul, Irwan, Firdauss and the whole JomSocial team for keeping the event alive.